Thoughts from a Part-Core Gamer

Friends like These

A funny thing happened the other night in WoW that I thought I’d try to share. I really have no idea how well this will translate into text, but I figured I’d give it a shot. My blind buddy gets a lot of flak because – well – for no reason, really. Just because he’s my buddy and that’s what guys do.

One of his core personality characteristics is self-sufficiency, almost to the point of never asking anyone for anything. He prides himself on this self-reliance. He enchants and gems his own gear, brings his own flasks, and is always to raid on time without needing a summon.

Except recently. For whatever reason, in the last few days he’s been a bit turned around. When we decided to go to Dragon Soul, he flew to Dragonblight – an easy mistake to make, but still, we gave him flak for it. He asked for a summon, but we were already in the instance, and the stone’s all the way up at the top of the cavern. He was annoyed he’d have to fly their himself, and that we weren’t going to wait for him. So when my other buddy and I went into the instance and got killed by the first boss, he viciously gloated that we’d gotten ourselves killed. We of course blamed him for being in the wrong place. It was all friendly, but heated nonetheless.

He got mad enough to actually complain that we gave him too much shit instead of thanking him for tanking, so of course I immediately thanked him for his tanking, which he complained about because it was “so disingenuous.” You just can’t win with some people.

Afterwards, we flew out to Ulduar to help out another friend. This time, my blindish buddy for some insane reason instead ported to Uldum. He was really off his game. This time, of course, we offered to summon him and flew to the stone and waited. Instead, this time, he showed up in Dalaran complaining that he didn’t need a summon because he had the Signet of the Kirin Tor. So this time, when we were willing to help him, he blew us off. Naturally we gave him even more grief.

But it wasn’t over yet. After all of this, we decided to do an MSV mount run. We hearthed to Shrine, and I told my buddy to fly to MSV North/Northwest of Shrine. We got there, and naturally he was nowhere to be found. I checked his location in the battle.net and saw he was in “The Gilded Foyer.” Well, that sounded like a place in Shrine, so I began to berate him for not even having left Shrine yet. He snapped back instantly that he was not only AT the instance but already INSIDE. Well, I had been put in my place, so I apologized for having made an assumption and stepped in. The group I was with went ahead and pulled the first trash back and was obliterated.

Well, it turned out he was in Mogu’Shan Palace. He’d gone into the wrong instance. We all had a good laugh, of course, and gave him an exponentially larger amount of flak since he’d been so sure he was in the right this time.

A fine ending to this story happened while writing it. I was on Mumble telling my buddy I was writing this post, and he defensively pointed out that it was “my fault” because I’d given him “ambiguous directions.” Technically, he’s right, of course, but I pointed out that MS Palace had a purple, dungeon entrance and MS Vaults had a green, raid instance. He insisted that the one he’d gone into had a green entrance, so I told him to go there and take a screenshot.